Archive for the ‘.TV Spotlight’ Category

.TV time! It hasn’t been the most active past two months for .TV news but there have been many impressive sales and plenty going on behind the scenes.

It was pointed out in a thread at AllThings.tv that SanFrancisco.tv and Hamburg.tv, which were registered on the premium drops in early September have already exchanged hands. James Black, a major .TV player, picked these up from the drop and looks to have flipped them pretty quickly. James has been pretty quiet the last few months so we may never know the sales price but I would be willing to bet some massive ROI was gained on both names.

I was glued to the TV and YouTube watching WSOP final table coverage this year because one of my friends from college days, Jeremy Ausmus made it to the final table and won 5th place (good for $2.1 million!). While watching, I kept noticing CardPlayerTV logos everywhere. CardPlayer.com is the most popular poker player magazine and they also have CardPlayerTV portion of their website now that has thousands of videos with millions of views. I’m always baffled by why such video heavy websites promote their brand with ‘TV’ next to it but never bother to acquire the .TV name to at least re-direct. CardPlayer.tv is a parked page and must have seen a nice spike in traffic during the recent WSOP coverage on ESPN.

Back in 2010 I interviewed Michael Berkens in a .TV Spotlight post to chat about .TV names. Michael’s MostWantedDomains.com brokered Jeu.tv earlier this year for $50k and just last month his Legacy Fund sold oo.tv for $18k, which is the highest reported .TV sale in this spotlight. The name was picked up just over a year ago for $2,150, another awesome ROI and .TV sale.

Update: DomainStore.tv is still a great place to list and purchase .TV names. The DomainStore.tv sale newsletters have not been going out as frequently but are still being published. In fact, I’ve purchased a couple .TV names from the newsletter recently (Thanks Brian!). I always look forward to opening up the DomainStore.tv emails as there are always deals to be had.

Here is your TV Spotlight (incomplete) list of .TV sales over the last couple of months put together with help from allthings.tv, namepros .tv subforum and dnjournal.

Time for another .TV update! Well, I keep getting emails from Fabulous.com encouraging me to ‘improve my online presence’ with a .TV domain name. Interesting that they have just recently added .TV to the short list of extensions that their registrar supports. The retail pricing at Fabulous is $49.95, with that kind of markup I doubt people are rushing to fab to grab their .TV name. Even if their vip pricing is half that, I still prefer name or dynadot where you can hand reg new .TV’s for approx $11 bucks.

Domain Name Wire posted about MLB.tv earlier this month, it just turned ten years old. Over the last ten years Major League Baseball has been using this name to promote it’s video subscription service even though it still redirects to a page on MLB.com. According to DNW it has delivered over 1.1 billion live video streams and serves over 1 million clips per day on average.

I have been continuing to grow my .TV portfolio as well. A few of my recent pickups: CarsForSale.tv, SmartScreen.tv, Ziplining.tv and Goth.tv (goth w. an investment partner).

Here is an incomplete list of some of the .TV sales reported since my last .TV spotlight post in at the end of June (thanks to allthings.tv, namepros .tv subforum and dnjournal)

As news of the new gTLDs, digital archery and ICANN dominate domain industry headlines, .TV continues to grow with more strong sales, developments and support from the domain community. Since my last .TV update, I have seen nearly $200k in reported .TV sales (see list below).

… at this point in time I would say .COM, .TV, .ME, Are the 3 primary extensions today and into the years ahead. We will see if any of the new extensions are universal. I can’t see more than a handful even having a chance and I don’t count .Company because I see that more as an Intranet as opposed to an Internet.

This is some serious support from a true domain visionary. Makes you wonder besides Rick.tv, what/how many .TV names eRealEstate owns.

It was announced earlier this month that HDNet (owned by Mark Cuban) will be re-branding to AXS.tv in a venture pulling together HDNet, Ryan Seacrest Media, AEG and other partners. Very interesting but not surprising that they went with a .TV domain name (it is after all a TV network brand). What is odd is that the new company chose a three letter domain, which is supposed to be pronounced ‘access dot tv’ problem is they don’t own access.tv.

In other .TV news, Cable.tv which sold last year for $20k is now a developed website that resells cable tv services in a daily deal sort of fashion. The site just recently launched and is already ranked 1.5m by alexa in global traffic and 500k in the U.S. I love the idea behind the site, it will be interesting to see how the brand develops/grows.

Here is an incomplete list of some of the .TV sales reported since my last .TV spotlight post in April (thanks to allthings.tv, namepros .tv subforum and dnjournal)

.TV had a very strong first quarter this year. The extension continues to gain steady traction in mainstream media as I see more and more .TV urls promoted on television. I am also seeing a lot of strategic banner advertising by Verisign online for the .TV extension. I really think 2012 has big things in store for .TV.

The biggest news for .TV so far this year is that Verisign renewed their contract with Tuvalu through 2021. The contract was due up in 2016 and there was uncertainty that Verisign and Tuvalu were going to come to an agreement which made many skeptical of the future of the ccTLD. This contract extension not only gives investors refreshed confidence but may have skeptics looking at .TV in a different light.

An interesting happening last week, Tweet.TV the Realtime Social TV Guide earned a seed investment of $750,000 from angel investor Joe Kalfa. Tweet.tv inspires to recreate the TV-guide with social infusion. Honestly, I’m not sure of the business model or the idea but I love the creativity as well as the fact investors are starting to warm up to .TV startups.

Here are a few sales reported since January. I compiled this list with help from DomainSales.tv and NamePros .TV reported sales thread.

I feel many of these sales are on the low side because they are names being sold from resellers to resellers/investors. Trailer.tv for under $3k and replay.tv under $2k were great buys. Interesting side notes about a couple of the sales – Revolt.tv was bought by one of Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs companies and is supposed to be used to launch a music themed TV network. Also, Netflix.com is now the new owner of netflix.tv, the .tv domain is currently not resolving.

There are also some excellent sales in the list above such as Jeu.tv which was brokered by Mike Berkens’ MostWantedDomains.com for seller Ammar from AllThings.tv (congrats Ammar!). In case you missed it, I interviewed Mr. Berkens where we spoke specifically about .TV names in .TV Spotlight post #6.

I read about most of these sales at AllThings.tv, the dedicated .TV forum. Talk.tv for $40,000 was a nice sale, a fair price for that premium .tv name. Not sure who the buyer is (whois still shows Sedo) but it looks like the name may be developed out as there is a start to a website on the domain. I think Party.tv was a great deal at under $4k.

Welt.tv was a little surprising going for €3,400, it was picked up by a German company called Ascio Technologies Inc. I like to see one word sales like this. I have several one word and four letter .TV names similar to this one. The treat.tv sale caught my eye. That’s another one word name that I actually flipped to the seller, looks like his flip was more profitable!

I’ve been visiting the Watch.tv blog since it has been very active lately. They have been showcasing many .TV Advocates over the last few weeks. Advocates are people who spend a few minutes in a video talking about the benefits of using .TV names as well as video to promote their businesses online.